On Irreversible

by Helen Donlon

Helen Donlon has an MA in Applied Linguistics (London), and has researched de Saussure, Derrida and post-structuralist theory. She is currently working in Ibiza as a music book publisher.

Argentinian-born writer/director Gaspar Noé has already attracted plenty of admiration and disparagement for his as yet small body of work. He insists on positioning a nihilism at the core of his films; a sort of malign destiny that gives a sustained feeling of hopelessness. His gritty reputation was defined with his first major feature, Seul contre tous (I Stand Alone, 1998), which was the recipient of several European awards, including the Mercedes Benz Award at the Cannes Film Festival, Best Screenplay at Sitges (Catalunya) and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Sarajevo Film Festival.

Seul contre tous was a feature-length sequel to an earlier short, Carne (1991) itself the recipient of both a Prix Tournage at Avignon and an SACD Award at Cannes. Shot on 16mm, the 40-minute Carne opens with the brutal slaughtering of a horse. It stars Noé's partner and collaborator, Lucile Hadzihalilovic (director and writer of Good Boys Use Condoms, 1998, and the forthcoming L'École) as a nurse, and Phillipe Nahon as a horsemeat butcher. While British critics balked at the idea of the horsemeat butcher, and castigated the French for this peculiarly Gallic culinary leaning, Noé scoffed in interviews at the hypocrisy of a nation who, as he was quick to point out, turn a blind eye to the shipping their own old horses to France, to meet this very fate.

When fashion designer, Agnes B, offered money to help finance Seul contre tous, it was because Noé had been initially turned down by Canal Plus, who were less than thrilled to find that it was effectively a sequel to Carne. Nahon the butcher was being brought back, and the question on everyone's lips was 'what about the incestual fantasies he had about his daughter?' The studio had hoped Noé would use his multi-award winning talent to go in a different direction. However, the film got made, and predictably received a mixed reception. It was also featured, showing on a TV screen, in a scene in Baise-moi (Despentes/Trinh Thi, 2000), as a thank you note to Noé for his continual encouragement throughout the shooting of Baise-moi.

A repeated premise in Noé's work is that revenge is a justifiable part of existence. In Irréversible, this theme is continued. Vengeance is a human right, the neighbourhood vigilante says to Marcus (Vincent Cassel). There is no turning the other cheek in Noé's world. Throughout Irréversible, all three lead actors reflect emotions which vary from the mundane to the supercharged, and the twelve naturalistic scenes are supposed to show us what people are like when pushed to the edge of reason by an attack on their immediate environment. In this case, Alex (Monica Bellucci) is the environment, and Marcus and Pierre, her ex (Albert Dupontel) are the protectors and avengers of that environment. Once it has been seriously threatened, they have to act out their roles.

Time destroys everything (a line from Ovid's Metamorphosis) is the film's byline. In the final cartoon-like scene, Alex is lying on the grass reading An Experiment With Time by J.W. Dunne, and she also refers to it in an earlier scene. The book lays out Dunne's theories about the connections between dreams, time-shifting and premonition. Alex says that while reading the book, she had a dream about entering a dark red tunnel, which indeed turns out to be a kind of premonition, as the rape scene takes place in such a tunnel.

The film's scenes are presented in reverse order, with vertical pan editing between each scene, giving the impression, along with an uncomfortable use of sound, of being high, and not always pleasantly so. It had been Noé's intention to make a film about drugs, following the relative success of Seul contre tous. This was the point when he approached Cassel and Bellucci, and asked them if they would like to star in an erotic film, a sort of Noé tribute to Ai no corrida (Oshima, 1976). After they both decided the idea of pornography did not appeal to them as actors, Noé suggested they consider a rape revenge drama, and they both signed up. Research for the drugs film, which was to be set in Tokyo, may then have influenced his dark, trippy composition of sound and image in Irréversible.

At the beginning of Irréversible, Phillipe Nahon (to whom Noé had promised a part in return for his unpaid earlier work in Carne), and a character played by Stéphane Drouot (a 1980's cult director who allegedly became heavily dependent on amphetamines several years ago. He was released from hospital for the shooting of the scene) sit together in a room. The dialogue is improvised, as it is for much of the film. "Le temps detruit tout" (time destroys everything), Nahon says. He tells Drouot he has been in prison for having sex with his daughter (like his character in Carne/Seul contre tous), whilst the camera moves across their naked bodies, and slowly round the room. Noé's camera, and the sparse lighting direction of Benoît Debie create an intense feeling of proximity to the two men, and the spectator immediately grasps the clamminess and claustrophobia of this opening scene.

At first it looks like they are in a prison cell, but it is just a room above the s/m club which is about to feature in the next scene. At the sound of wailing sirens outside on the street, we are pulled out of the room and into the barely lit Paris night, to witness the loading of a pummelled body into an ambulance. This leads directly into perhaps the most challenging ten minutes of the film.

In his most kinetic and primal performance to date, Cassel's Marcus now appears as a detonated fuse, hellbent on vengeance as he thrashes his way into a Dante-esque s/m club called le Rectum. He lashes out verbally, and attacks random patrons in his quest for someone known as "le ténia" (the tapeworm). At this point, the camera is at its most unsteady, as it bounces off walls in room after room of dark red-lit spaces, acting as both pugilist and punchbag to Marcus's energy.

These toxic and nauseating early scenes, aided by the brilliant use of 27-herz frequency, which has been used by police to disperse protestors, make you wonder: Where do you go from here, if this is the first ten minutes? Exactly how much more uncomfortable can this get?

Noé himself is in this scene as he wanted to avoid (though he didn't succeed) accusations of homophobia for setting the scene for Marcus's homophobic rantings in a gay club. He has said that it made more sense than choosing any other male-only setting (which was necessary for the testosterone passion and rage that he wanted to portray), such as a prison cell, which would not have made sense to the plot. So he appears naked and masturbating in the club.

What follows results in the wrong man (as with Carne) being pummelled to death, with the end of a fire extinguisher by Pierre, after the man they suspect to be "le ténia" has pushed Marcus to the ground and threatened to sodomise him. In fact the real "le ténia" (played by ex-kick boxing champion Jo Prestia) stands laughing in the background as Pierre attacks the wrong man. Until this point, is would have been very difficult to feel sympathy for Marcus and Pierre, except that the camera gives us little choice, as it forces us to be carried along through the whole sequence almost inside of their rage, aided by the droning, neurotic soundtrack which occupies the length of the whole scene. And who (or what?) is 'the tapeworm'? The imagination is already reeling.

As the scenes unfold in reverse order across the film, the vertiginous and claustrophobic cinematography starts to become increasingly calm, lucid and naturalistic. The deliberate use of colour change also underscores this. While the opening scenes are conducted by a hyperkinetic lens, the camerawork gets progressively calmer throughout, with colours going from dark red and black, to green and yellow, and finally, in the closing scene of the film, to blue.

If we put the scenes back into chronological order, starting with the last, the story is a classic revenge drama gone awry. We discover that Alex is living with Marcus, and has just found out she is pregnant. They seem to be very happy together, and there is a scene of domestic bliss played out before they set out for the evening with Alex's ex, Pierre (an academic who is apparently too cerebral to be good in bed) for a party. Here we get to know all three better by observing their social circle from the inside. The party guests are a friendly, intimate and flirtatious crowd. Whilst Alex dances and chats with her pregnant girlfriend, Marcus drags Pierre into a bathroom with two women, hoping to get him laid, although it is Marcus who snorts cocaine and starts kissing one of the women. The dialogue is improvised throughout. Marcus introduces himself as Vincent to a woman at the party, which was kept in, perhaps to prove the improvisation point.

This scene establishes the closeness and gregariousness of Alex and Marcus, the beautiful, popular young couple, although Marcus is too relaxed for Alex on this occasion. She leaves the party because, as she has just found out she is pregnant, she is not interested in taking cocaine, getting drunk or flirting with acquaintances. She ditches Marcus, who she has not yet told about the pregnancy, and as she heads home she gets raped and badly beaten up in a subway. When Marcus leaves the party and sees her disfigured body being carried away, he goes berserk and, with an equally berserk Pierre in tow, they set out for vengeance, having been persuaded by a local vigilante that the police aren't interested enough, and that it is his human right to seek vengeance. With the help of a local transvestite, they discover that the attacker might be a pimp known as "le ténia", and that he may be hiding in the s/m club, le Rectum. And hence to the opening scenes.

The actual rape scene is considerably more grotesque than frightening. Noe is adept at subverting Laura Mulvey's themes of scopophilia, narcissicism and the male gaze (1) Far from being fantasist fodder, the violence and disgust that Noé characters manifest get right under your skin, and make you complicit, not as voyeur but as helpless ally. This is also manifestly the case with the revenge drama which occurs towards the beginning of Irréversible in the club . Noé is deeply committed to each of his main characters. Even as Alex is presented as a classic example of what Mulvey calls "to-be-looked-at-ness" in some scenes, the rapid transition to an absolute subversion of this in the rape scene is possibly unique in film history. Once Noé's camera has followed Alex from behind her to the spot where "le ténia" grabs her, it is Bellucci herself who directed the rest of the scene. No music, scary or otherwise is added.

André Bazin said "'as good a way as any towards understanding what a film is trying to say to us is to know how it is saying it".(2) Noé's camera is absolutely still for the whole nine minutes. He wanted a static shot once the rape had started because, he says, if they'd moved the camera even once it would have been putting the spectator in the rapist's head, and it was vital that they stayed in Alex's head, so the leading eye is hers throughout, whilst the rapist lowers his eyes several times. Alex is angry, confused and constantly working out how to survive the ordeal, as is reflected by Bellucci's brilliant eyework, displaying many emotions, including moments of exasperation, and not just the one we have come to expect from cinematic portrayals of rape, i.e. transfixed terror. Importantly, the scene is punctuated about halfway through its nine-minute duration by a slight yet surprisingly disturbing background interlude. As we see Alex and the rapist on the ground, we see a figure enter the subway and stop for a few moments, observe the scene and then turn back and creep away, rather than attempt to help her. He just quietly slips out in the background, unseen by the rapist and the victim, but observed by an uncomfortable audience. This act of supreme cowardice is such a real-life situation, and inserting this moment made the scene all the more effective, moving it even further away from the necessary parameters of scopophilia. This one moment of cowardice was so hopeless it became almost as ghastly as the rape itself. The spectator has now felt that cowardice and is still there, alone again with Alex and the rapist, but, unlike the guy who slipped away, we have to stay, and we are suddenly made very aware of this entrapment.

Noé fought ferociously against having the nine minute scene cut by Quentin Thomas at the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) after its controversial screening at the Edinburgh Film festival. He argued that nine minutes is what he wanted, to make it a convincing length, having done his research with several rape victims. Other films pretend that a rape is over in a minute or two, sometimes less.

In the scene where we go back to the earlier part of the evening, with Alex and Marcus in bed in the late afternoon before the party, Noé adds in some visual references to Kubrick. On opposite walls of their bedroom he has framed posters of 2001 and The Killing, whilst, as with Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Noé has cast a popular box-office married couple as the leads. On the bed, Marcus playfully holds his hands over Alex's mouth as he lies on top of her (just as we have seen the rapist do in the earlier, but chronologically later scene) and some of the sexual dialogue, now in a hugely different context, parallels that of the rapist. One of the reasons why the film works best told backwards is because these words are still ringing in our ears, and we are forced to recontextualise continually.

Anyone who manages to stay the duration of the film's 90 minutes (which was not at all the case at its Cannes premiere) will probably stay because they will become caught in the emotional net in which the director skilfully ensnares them. The explicity violent strobe lights which take the place of the traditional closing credits (which have, of course, come at the start of the film, in keeping with the reverse chronology of scenes) serve as one last disorientation of the spectator by the director, and a dizzying final statement of the director's trademark nihilism.

1. Mulvey L 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen, 16, 3, Autumn 1975
2. Bazin, A 'The Evolution of the Language of Cinema', What is Cinema? Volume 1.